A Cop-Cartel Heist and Sky High Homicide Rates: What the Hell is Going on in Tijuana
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Well, we got a minute. I'm going to buy that truck I've been wanting. Wait, don't you need, like, weeks to shop for a car? I don't. Carvana makes it super convenient to find exactly what I want. Hold up. You're buying a car on your phone? Isn't that more of a laptop thing? You can shop wherever you want.

I like to do my research, read reviews, compare models. Plus, Carvana has thousands of options. How'd you decide on that truck? Because I like it. Oh, that is a great reason. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. It's mid-November 2023, and a half dozen local and state cops are hanging out together in the Mexican city, Tijuana, Baja, California.

This is no boozy social. Krispy Kremes are optional at best. The boys in blue are instead putting the final touches on a mad plan to steal a huge shipment of drugs from a warehouse right under the noses of the city's most dangerous cartel members. Soon after the meeting, the cops put their harebrained plan into action. They drive a pickup onto the building, load its flatbed with plastic-wrapped bales of cocaine, and drive right out the front entrance.

Could have been lifted right from the pages of Hollywood script. Only thing is, the cops haven't been so subtle about their heist, and Narcos aren't exactly known for their mercy. Less so the wing of the Sinaloa cartel controlled by Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, one of the world's most feared drug lords, and who apparently owns the gear.

He and others like him have made Tijuana, which borders the US city of San Diego, Mexico's most violent city by far, home to a gigantic, roiling underworld of drugs, guns and people trafficking. Its murder rate is twice that of second-ranked Ciudad Juarez, and the city's charismatic mayor has even been moved to a military barracks after a barrage of death threats. It's chaos, and it's about to get way worse.

On November 18, just hours after the raid, gunmen buried 30 rounds of machine gun fire into the facade of Tijuana's federal prosecutor's office. Moments later, one of the alleged police conspirators is shot dead on a city street.

A week later, cartel gunmen sprayed bullets at the state prosecutor's office. And three days after that, on November 27, a state detective who's under investigation for the heist is filling up his car with gas when attackers on a motorbike corner him. The detective sees it coming and fires his vehicle's ignition, but it's too late. The killers launch a volley of rounds at him. The detective's car loaches forward and hits a column. He collapses, dead, at the wheel.

The killing spree doesn't end there. In the following weeks, the Carios drop another three officers who aren't even believed to have been there at the warehouse. The Sinaloas aren't just after the perps. They're on a cop-killing rampage. And everybody in town is terrified they're next for the block. Tijuana has never seen anything of this scale, says a former police chief. And that is saying a lot. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hello and welcome to the show that lifts up the bark of humankind, scraping the barrel of moral decency to expose the dregs of our species each and every week. A bit like a backwards Mr. Muscle, which is ironic because I'm absolutely stacked, of course.

No idea what you just said, but I feel like half the listeners just turned this off after the last sentence. Good. Anyway, I'm your host, Sean Williams in Wellington. I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City. It is our first show together in 2024, and I've just returned from a lovely holiday.

holiday in Australia, which I now love. Sorry, mom and dad. I'm aiming to lose a bunch of weight, run a half marathon, and sell a TV show. Any New Year's resolutions for you? I mean, where do you fall on New Year's Eve anyway? Do you do anything about it or do you just kind of moan like I mostly do? I think you just need to start some sort of old school blog about your day or at least get a diary or something because that New Zealand isolation might be getting to you. I mean, I saw, I think, the greatest piece of sports skill

live that I've ever seen in my life yesterday. So I'm kind of riding high on that. And I might do for the next two years. Anyway, it's been a pretty mad news week for organized crime from completely opposite sides of the world. So in South America, there's been a takeover, a new show by Ecuadorian gang members. Really scary stuff. I think the president there has installed martial law or something similar and

It's just really crazy how things are going there. And we did a bonus on the slaying of presidential candidate Fernando Villavienzo, Villa Vicencio, a while back. And we'll get back to what's going on in Ecuador for another show really, really soon. And then over in the Pacific, you've got Port Moresby, which is the capital of Papua New Guinea, where I was recently. And that's erupted into deadly violence after cops went on strike, which is probably not a good idea when the gangs run town.

just exploding into violence and what leaders have called the city's, quote, darkest day. 15 dead and counting, really nutty stuff over there. And if you want to learn more about that one, head back to our show on PNG's Rascal Gangs for a couple of years back, I think. Basically, tribal warfare spilling into the city, street gangs, complete madness.

Yeah, I mean if you want to know how broken our sort of brains are and not to be like, "Oh look at us" sort of thing, but like Sean was texting me after that happened and was just really mad that he wasn't there for it. He was pissed that it happened two weeks after he left. But you know, how responsible would you say you are personally for what's happening there? I did see a couple of raised eyebrows when I was at the bar there. So I would like to attribute some anger to myself. But they could have just done it straight afterwards. Yeah, I was kind of pissed off.

Yeah, I'm going to have to probably wait quite a long time for the next Pacific capital city to descend into martial law. But anyway, then there's the stuff that we got going off the coast of Yemen with the Houthis attacking cargo vessels, the US and the UK launching strikes. I mean, that's like pretty underworld podcast adjacent, I reckon. And we've done that on Yemen. So I'm going to look into that as well. There's never any shortage of episode ideas over here. That's one of the best things about doing this. And yeah,

Today's show though, as you might have guessed from the title and that kind of crazy cold open, is all about Tijuana, TJ. The gateway to Mexico, favorite spot for day trippers, strippers, and bad tippers. But also for crime. Yeah, you like that one, didn't you? Really, really violent crime. And it's been getting steadily worse over the past few years with the increase in human trafficking and smuggling. There's a difference, of course, meth and fentanyl flooding across the border, smuggling

So if you didn't know what's going on in Mexico's most dangerous city before now, consider the next 45 minutes or so a kind of spark notes, pub chat fodder, because it's really, really crazy stuff. Yeah, it was actually surprising to me to hear that it was back being, I think, one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico again. It's kind of, you know, those border cities, I feel like,

I remember articles and stories from years past, maybe like 2013, 2014, about how cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez were having like a, you know, they're much safer than their darkened days and having like a rebirth. But obviously things changed in the span of a few years. And now I guess they're back to being where they were decades ago. You know, it's like with those border cities in Mexico,

It's kind of like whack-a-mole, you know, various cartels taking over. It's safe for a while because there's one in control and then they fight over territory and it just, the blood spills into the streets again. Yeah, and I'm interested to hear from you, I guess, like how the American media presents this stuff as well because so much of this is a kind of cross-border criminal, like crime wave and so much of it is coming from or coming to the US that...

I don't know. I feel like when I was looking at this show and I was researching it, there was a lot that was kind of just bedded in one side of the border without kind of mentioning both sides. And I feel that the media is missing the trick there. They should be reporting kind of like, well, in Tijuana's case, San Diego and Tijuana at the same time. Because I think a lot of it is across the border, but I don't know, maybe. Anyway, let's kick off with a bit of history because, you know, why not?

And I know we've covered some of this before, but Tijuana's modern drug trade, that begins back in the 1960s. And that's when the Tijuana cartel is founded by a group of Sinaloans who work alongside legendary trafficker Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a.k.a. El Padrino. And he makes a fortune shipping marijuana and heroin into the United States.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that was cool. And Anesco Fonseca Carrillo, aka Don Neto. And if you're not getting it from these nicknames, I mean, these guys end up being really, really big deals in the global drug industry. And the group leaves Sinaloa to form the Guadalajara Cartel in the late 70s amid mass arrests and a military shootout that leaves Aviles, the mountain lion, dead.

He's replaced by a short, pug-faced narco you may have heard of before, and that is, of course, Joaquin Guzman El Chapo. There are a series of splits in the organisation in the early 1980s. Fonseca's nephews, Amado and Vicente Carillo Fuentes, they head off to form the Juarez Hotel. I keep stumbling on the names because I'm...

Spanish-Spanish and Mexican-Spanish is different. Well, five brothers of the Ariano-Felix family, that's Benjamin, Ramon, Francisco Rafael, Francisco Javier, and Eduardo, they formed the core of the Tijuana cartel.

Now in 1985, as probably most of you know, the killing of DEA agent Kiki Camarena forces the US into action and it pressures Mexico's government into launching a massive narco manhunt. Authorities arrest Caro Quintero, numero uno, later that year. And in 1989, he's joined behind bars, although not the same bars because that'd be a bloodbath, by El Padrino, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo himself.

And it's behind bars that El Padrino divvies up his empire. Yeah, I think Cara Quintero is actually out now, right? If you listen to that episode that you mentioned, the cartel sleepover episode, we had an opportunity to embed with a faction of Sinaloa that was fighting him. His reestablished cartel. This is back in like 2021. I'm not sure where he's at right now, if he's alive or killed or thrown in prison, but...

Yeah, would have been fun. Yeah, there's actually a few members of this cartel that are kind of trying to get out of jail now. I think one of them is saying that he's found Jesus. I mean, they all say they found Jesus, right? But yeah, I've seen a few kind of parole requests that are being turned down left, right and center, which I guess, given the stuff we're going to learn, is interesting.

Fair enough? I don't know. Anyway, El Chapo and his partner, Hector Luis Parma Salazar, they get given parts of Baja California and Sonora, which is the vast northwestern state, whose border sprawls up against Arizona and New Mexico. Rafael Aguilar Gallardo, a former cop and intelligence officer, well, he's given a stretch of land from Juarez in Chihuahua

which backs right onto the Texan city of El Paso, of course. And that stretches all the way over to Nuevo Lareo, over on the east side of the border with Texas. So that's a pretty big stretch of land he's getting. Meanwhile, the Arellano Felix brothers get Tijuana.

which some say at this time is the jewel in the criminal crown. In fact, crime has always been a strong point for Tijuana, whose name comes from a ranch erected by a Spanish soldier in 1829, and he named it for his auntie Juana, hence Tijuana. Oh, wow. I had no idea. The more you know. There we go. Some say it's like an indigenous name, but I think this is far more likely. At this point, Mexico is just a blip on the global narcotics map.

It's really nothing. But in 1909, something seismic happens that February, and I'm going to quote from a really good University of Chicago paper here, quote, in a carefully timed effort to demonstrate American resolve in the drug fight, the United States Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, a law that prohibited the importation of so-called prepared or smokable opium into the United States. Yes, it's opium right now.

That legislation, combined with opium market upheavals in Asia caused by the 1907 Sino-British agreement almost instantly turned Mexico into a major supplier of illicit opium to its neighbour north of the border. Further prohibitions on the US side over the coming years, from alcohol to marijuana, would eventually inspire more smuggling, further global connections, renewed political responses, and so forth in a now familiar cycle.

Mexico already had a storied history in hallucinogens by this point, which are used by indigenous folks of all kinds for all kinds of religious and social ceremonies, of course. And the Spanish had even tried banning peyote in the 1600s. But this new opium route transforms Mexico's drug trade from artisanal stuff to big business almost overnight.

Traders from Macau who are getting stung on opium export routes through China, Canada, Australia, they suddenly turn their attentions to Mexico. I remember how we got into this and Mexico's anti-Chinese yellow scare in my episode with Noah Hurwitz about his book on El Chapo a while back.

So if you want to know more, head back there. Yeah, I think they talk about this either in El Narco or in Sam Quinonez's book or in both about how the people who started growing opium in Mexico were Chinese market workers, I think, right? Yeah. And the Mexican criminal underground organizations, they had made a ton of money smuggling during Prohibition. Once that gets repealed, they need a new product after the repeal. And that's when they start sort of taking it over, all the hatred against the Chinese people.

really amps up and they use it to just take over their opium fields. Yeah, exactly. It's this kind of like, it's what that University of Chicago paper is kind of, you know, you get your response, you get your

Response to that from the drug trade and it just keeps on ramping up and up and up until you get to the stuff that's going on today. For Tijuana though, back at the beginning of the century, the next important date arrives in 1914. That year the Panama Canal is constructed and the year after that, the US holds a massive expo in the pretty little colonial town of San Diego, to which almost 4 million people come, which is huge. I think San Diego is only home to like 30 or 40,000 people at the time.

Tijuana's just a hop and a skip from there, of course, and Americans soon realize that they can visit the city as a welcome respite from all the pesky rules and regs of their home country.

Gambling, of course, is one such vice, and Tijuana opens a massive, opulent horse racing track in 1916. I won't get into it too much here, but the place was by most accounts wild and depraved, which is just how we like it, eh? Just like the dog track in Revere. Exactly. During Prohibition, Tijuana also gets a rep as a party town, and bars, clubs, and casinos sprout up along the Avenida Revolucion, which is still, even today, the landing spot for drunken tourists.

And some folks even move over to Mexico just to avoid prohibition. I mean, fair enough. One of them is an Italian chef who in 1924 has just moved from California to open his own restaurant in Tijuana by the name of Cesar "Cesar" Cardini. And that 4th of July, Cesar is welcoming a big group of jubilant Americans when he runs out of ingredients.

All Caesar's got kicking about in the kitchen is lettuce stalks, olive oil, eggs, crouton, parmesan cheese and Worcestershire sauce. So he tosses them all together and hey,

The rest is history. Come for organized crime, guys. Stay for food legends. You are welcome. God, what a legend. Yeah, amazing, eh? Anyway, salads aside, one early Tijuana spot stands head and shoulders above all others. The Agua Caliente Touristic Complex is the wind start of its time. A little nod to okay there. Opened in 1928 as the city's sinful status is reaching its high point.

This place has a spa, a greyhound track, a horse racing track, home to Agua Caliente Handicap, which is the richest race in North America at the time, an airport golf course that hosts PGA events, and, naturally, a giant, giant casino. Rice Myercroft, in a 2014 Washington Post piece, quote, The golden age of Tijuana was during Prohibition, when the city was mythologized as the premier playground for the rich and thirsty.

Hollywood stars with a taste for betting and boozing made it a favorite getaway, and the city came to represent the shadowy side of the American appetite, a place to do anything and everything that we wouldn't allow ourselves to do at home. - Border towns, man, I mean, we used to talk about it all the time, but especially when you have one side, one country's more puritanical and the other is more free-for-all, they just become fun and sketchy and dangerous places.

Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of those about. I mean, I'm looking into a story on the kind of Vietnamese-Cambodian border, and there's some pretty crazy stuff going on there. So, yeah, border towns, there's plenty of stories there. And this one, Tijuana, stars, they flock to it. Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, and perhaps, maybe, Al Capone. Kind of sounds like swinging Acapulco in the 60s and 70s, you know?

Yeah, I think they were kind of rivals to each other at that time. Croth, that Washington Post journalist, she goes hunting for the truth behind the rumors that old Scarface himself built bars and restaurants at Agua Caliente. But it might be a myth. She kind of comes away empty handed from that story. But something that definitely isn't a myth is that drugs from Tijuana are huge even by this point.

And there are tons of examples of the Mexican military skimming profits off opium, weed, and bootleg liquor to line their own pockets. By the 1930s, Tijuana's narcos are so well established they're already using planes to get products into the states. And with the tourist boom comes another trade: sex. Solanorte is Tijuana's red light district, which for millions of Americans today is pretty much what TJ is still all about.

Here's the very reputable source, Tijuana Babes with the juice. Yeah, you just happened to be doing research and the site Tijuana Babes just popped up, huh? Yeah, I was looking for Tijuana Bibidas, right? And it just kind of popped up on Google. But anyway, I'm going to quote them. Quote, why does Tijuana have the second greatest red light district in the world? The answer is of multiple reasons. It's not the best written. It's a combination of the historical acceptance of prostitution both worldwide and specifically regarding Tijuana

The Mexican government's compliance of the sex trade, geography, politics on both sides of the border, the location of the US Navy's Pacific fleet, entrepreneurial greed, the Mafia, and many of Hollywood's leading male actors, who frequently ventured south of the border for inexpensive carnal fun. Tijuana was once the bomb in the 20s and 30s when it came to cabarets, sex, and bordellos.

Put simply, post-war urbanization meant people flooding into TJ looking for work and as Tijuana expands north to abut San Diego with all of its navy and military guys looking for fun. Pay by the hour, hotels pop up, the Sononote becomes a bona fide red light district and it grows from there. And I was kind of intrigued, right? I mean, what if it's the second best? What do you reckon the best is?

Like Amsterdam, I don't know. I mean, maybe before weed and mushrooms were legal everywhere, but it became basically a spot for like tourist groups of middle-aged people to walk around and go, oh my heavens. But I don't know, man. I assume they mean that. Maybe like Japan, Bangkok, but even there, I guess pretty regulated in ways. But the first time I did mushrooms was in the Amsterdam or like district. And let me tell you,

deeply unpleasant. You're basically just surrounded by the dregs of society, just dealers, junkies, drunken punters, you know, prostitutes. And even if you make it past that, you know, you start thinking about the Anne Frank house. So, uh, definitely, you know, do your hallucinations in the woods or on the beach kids. Don't do it. Don't do it in Amsterdam or in the middle of like cities.

Yeah, I had a similar kind of story actually. I went to Amsterdam for the first time and did a bunch of mushrooms in a coffee house. And then we all turned over the packets that we'd just done and it said for like three people or something. So I was basically tripping for about 12 hours going fucking nuts and walking around Amsterdam. And at one point I thought I'd gone deaf. And then I walked around a construction site and thought it was Disneyland. And

And then my friend fainted in the Burger King on Dam Square, and it was the middle of the PM's speech, and apparently we were on the news running through the crowd screaming, so...

Yeah, that was a really cool moment in my life. Anyway, whatever the best red light districts in the world, and you can post all the comments you like on all the social media stuff that we do, Tijuana is almost born into vice, in case you didn't get it already. And throughout the 20th century, despite a moral panic in the mid-30s seeing Santiago Caliente, the city keeps its shady rep all the way up until Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, el padrino,

he's dishing out his empire from prison in the early 90s. And the way he's done it, everyone's just happy and content to take their own little decent slice of the pie, right? Wrong. Soon afterwards, the Arianna Felix brothers look to spread out of Tijuana and they kill a close associate of El Chapo. War breaks, civilians are caught in the crossfire, and the Mexican state arrests a fleet of cartel chiefs. Despite that,

The Arellano Felix brothers manage to branch out. They make a pact with the Cayo Quintero clan in Sonora, the Millenio cartel in Michoacan, and alliances with other major narco states including Colima, Jalisco, and Oaxaca, allowing them to dominate the trade up and down Mexico.

At this point, I'm sure some of the listeners who don't follow this stuff are getting confused by the names of people, cartels, all that. But basically, all you have to know is they form alliances to fight other alliances over territory. They betray each other, then they form different alliances. And every time this happens, various cities where the established smuggling routes are turned into bloodbaths. And that's the long and short of it. Yeah, it's that kind of whack-a-mole. And something that sort of is emblematic of this comes in 1994.

Tijuana then becomes the stage for a high-profile political assassination when presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is shot dead on the campaign trail in the middle of the city. At least two gunmen are seen firing pistols at point-blank range in a crowd of up to 4,000 people and it launches the cartels right into the front of the public conscious.

"The country has no mechanism for dealing with something like this," says an expert at the time. I think it was a Washington Post piece again. And even now, senior officials believe the Colosio killing is a conspiracy, much like the JFK assassination. Even last October, AMLO, the current Mexican president, he connected the two killings, saying that Colosio is slain with a "state crime." Most everybody else, however,

I mean, believes, knows that the cartels did it. And this was a huge, huge news story in Mexico at the time. Now, El Chapo, who's been locked up for a lot of this madness, the wars that are breaking out in the mid-90s, but he breaks out of prison, of course, in 2001, and he goes on a rampage against the Arellano Felix brothers. In 2008, Eduardo Arellano Felix, considered the most sophisticated of the brood, is arrested, and the Tijuana cartel splits.

writes Inside Crime, the founding member's nephew Fernando Sanchez Arellano, alias El Ingeniero, I think that's engineer, headed up one faction, while Eduardo Teodoro Garcia Cimental, aka El Teo, or Tres Letras, Three Letters, or The Uncle, headed up another.

El Teo sought an alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel, while El Ingeniero reportedly allied himself with the Zetas. A bloody feud ensued, but following the arrest of El Teo in January 2010, the organization appeared to consolidate again under El Ingeniero. Christ, this might all seem a bit convoluted, but yes, essentially the Tijuana Cartel, or

It splits up and it makes pacts with Mexico's other big drug lords. And for a while from 2010, the city actually lives in relative peace as the Sinaloa cartel controls most of Tijuana and the TC, ironically, takes second spot in its namesake city. But the Aleana brothers start getting downed one by one.

Francisco Rafael, the eldest, he's gunned down at a party by an assassin dressed as a clown. I think they reversed that narrative in a Narcos TV show. Cop shoot Ramon, known for his sadistic torture techniques, at a seaside carnival. Luis Fernando Sanchez Arellano, who is a nephew, he's arrested while watching Mexico beat Croatia at the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

A lot of festive dying and arrest here. Yeah, I think Yohan Grillo, who I'm going to quote now, did a Time magazine piece in 2015, and he led with that, saying that they were all kind of getting off at sort of fiestas. And he writes, quote, the Klan may have done what is unthinkable for many in the macho cartel world then. Let a woman take the helm.

One of the sisters, Enadina Arianna Felix, could be running the remnants of the Tijuana cartel that traffics cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth over the world's busiest border crossing into California, American and Mexican agents say. The 54-year-old trained accountant is said to be less of a party animal or sadistic killer than her male relatives and more business-focused.

While there have been other female drug traffickers since the 1920s, Enedina, known as La Jefa or the boss, could be the first to head an entire cartel. Smashing that glass ceiling guys, good, we like to hear it. As Eowyn outlines in the piece, La Jefa, also known by the far better name Narco Mami, has made her name in the white collar side of the Tijuana cartel. So she's balancing books and she's laundering cash and opening front businesses like pharmacies.

How is there not a terrible female rapper from Miami already called Narco Mommy? Oh, man, you've got to guess that there is somewhere. Says the DA's Mike Vigil for this Time article by Yoann, quote, she is not into the wars of her brothers. She is into making alliances and making money. Her beauty may have also helped her make alliances with powerful traffickers such as Chapo Guzman.

The looks can, however, be deceiving. Despite her bookish background, under Narcomami's rule the TC begins taking back Tijuana neighborhoods from the Sinaloa cartel in 2015. And in 2016, when President Enrique Peña Nieto arrests El Chapo as part of a growing cartel crackdown, Narcomami sees her chance to strike.

Her boys form an alliance with the cartel Jalisco Nuevo Geracion, or CJNG, which is the grisly militaristic men acting under El Mencho, to flush the leaderless Sinaloans out of Baja California once and for all. We have, of course, done an episode on them, so go back and listen to that.

Yes, do that. And I don't know if there must be cartels that we haven't done at this point, but we've done most of them. And a Tijuana cartel has retained significant control over Baja Sin City ever since. And you might think that like 2010, this would actually make Tijuana a safer place, but you would be wrong.

Because Tijuana isn't your average narco town, right? It's crawling with illicit activity of all kinds, not to mention eager, rich tourists and its location right on the Californian border, which has made it the go-to spot for traffickers, pimps and other criminals.

Take human smuggling, for example, which sometimes becomes trafficking, i.e. slavery. Back in the late 90s, U.S. officials estimate that there are 10 to 12 family-based smuggling rings working the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. The most successful of these, though, is the Tijuana-based Peralta Brothers, originally called Los Tres Hermanos, the Three Brothers, until cops discover a fourth Peralta operating in the central city of Guanajuato, Oaxaca.

I hope I've got that one right. The Paratas are able to build a smuggling empire in part due to their enlisting officials into the payroll, which is pretty out there at the time. I think at one point they even get a U.S. customs agent on board, and he's thought to have waved thousands of smuggled migrants through Tijuana's San Isidro entry pool.

What's that line from? It might be Blow or is it a different... You know, it might be that movie Confidence with Ed Burns where they talk about getting a customs agent on board with them is such a big part of their plans. It's like the... I don't know. That is Blow, I think. Yeah, I don't know. But either way, it's one of the most important things they do when they talk about it. It's like the golden goose.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the goose that lays the golden egg, whatever that phrase is. Yeah, a big golden goose, a big goose. Yeah, it seems to be what these guys basically lean on for years and years, this one guy they managed to get inside the organization. But today, the industry seems to have even got more sophisticated and connected, so it's professionalized. I mean, despite all the political stuff about building walls and deporting folks, there's

The 70-mile stretch of border between San Diego, Tijuana and the Pacific Ocean has seen an estimated 300,000 illegal crossings in the last calendar year alone. That's up to 1,200 a day.

You just gave me an idea to put something about illegal border crossings in all caps, letters, and this episode title so we get those numbers. I mean, yeah, if we just isolate that sentence and stick it on TikTok, we'll probably make like a billion dollars. Last September, the U.S. Justice Department brought down a family smuggling ring headed by a Tijuana man named Luis Antonio Mendez Brahan.

maybe a cross-border thing there, who'd for years run his up with three of his own kids, writes the indictment, quote, the Mendez-Brayen organization allegedly operated in an area east of the Tecate port of entry and used an ever-changing cadre of spotters, guides, and drivers to facilitate the smuggling organization's criminal activities. The indictment alleges that the Mendez-Brayen group charged between six grand and eight grand for each migrant he arranged to be smuggled into the U.S., which seems ridiculous.

Anyway, Tijuana is actually home to the largest refugee camp in Mexico, which is pretty indicative of how it's become as a place for this kind of business. Vanden Feilbrad Brown, big friend of the pod, recently told the Brookings Institution's podcast that America's political posturing over the border has done little but emboldened smugglers at a time when, as I mentioned up top with Ecuador, violence is just forcing greater number of people north from Latin America.

Quote, "People are coming from the southern cone. They're coming through the Darien Gap, then they head through Central America to Mexico and try to get to the U.S." So Mexico has learned or did learn during the Trump administration that it can exercise enormous leverage over the United States and over issues of interest in the very multifaceted U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship by turning off and on the spigot of migration.

And this has really been highly detrimental to a whole set of US interests. And frankly, it's also been highly detrimental to the health of democracy in Mexico. She just knows, that woman knows like literally everything. Yeah, actually everything. I'm kind of annoyed that she said that on their podcast and not ours, but I guess she works for them. So that's, I'll let her have that. And this, I mean, you kind of see that in Europe as well, right? With what Russia and Belarus did with refugees coming into Western Europe. It seems to be a kind of new trend

uh asymmetrical form of warfare almost it's really interesting another trade that's kind of bifurcated over the past two decades is prostitution so tijuana is not alone in this of course but cartels and social media have lent it a two-tiered sex industry writes insight crime quote on one tier are those on the streets approaching passers-by these women and girls are managed by padrotes or pimps

And these pimps often form part of small family-based networks which can also work with organized criminal groups.

It goes on. A block away, though, is Tier 2. There, three prominent gentlemen's clubs, Adelita's Bar, Las Chavelas, and Hong Kong, that's the standout one there, have been mainstays for decades. Outside, several ATMs dispensing US dollars ensure patrons have enough cash to pay for a 20-minute encounter or extra services in a private suite. I mean, I'm not sure the existence of an ATM is that important.

Alarming, but yeah, you get the point. Anyway, sex work is permitted in the so-called "Zone de Tolerancia" near the border of the Zone of Tolerance, but organized pimps are able to pay their way out of the ghetto and control women in more salubrious-looking parts of town, pay off the cops, and make millions and millions of dollars.

Inside Crimes Reporter visits the Hotel Acapulco, for example, whose ground floor seafood restaurant shares a wall with a motel named the Rapid Inn, where girls can make 200 pesos or 10 bucks for half an hour's work.

I mean, there are so many double entendres there, I think we should probably just move on. But my shit jokes aside, this bias has partly created an explosion of violence against women that is raging across Mexico. So each year, over 3,000 Mexican women are murdered, one every two and a half hours, and 24,000 are missing. I mean, and we don't really know the true numbers of this. It's probably more. And only a small percentage of those are in

are investigated as femicides, i.e. women murdered specifically because they're women. And that is hardly surprising in a country where only 2% of crimes are solved. And as we learn from that cold open, police are pretty insanely corrupt.

There is an old Tijuana saying, quote, if you call a drug dealer, they'll ring your doorbell 10 minutes later. Call the pizza delivery guys and you'll be in a margarita within half an hour. But call the cops and you are still waiting two hours later for them to show. I mean, it's not the punchiest, but you get the point. And all of this means that there is an even bigger demand for Tijuana's main industry. The same one it's been great at for over a century. Drugs.

And that means bodies. One more thing on that homicide rate we mentioned earlier, Houston has about the same number of people as TJ, 2.1 million or so, and it has five times fewer murders. And Houston is considered pretty dangerous by US standards. Official statistics show that 12,377 people are currently missing in Mexico, which rights groups claim is massively understated.

Colectivo Uninacion Buscando, a missing people's NGO, it claims there are 18,000 in Baja California alone. It's unbelievable now. Quote, on a national level, there are 50,000 bodies that have yet to be identified. Although these are not included in the final count of people listed as disappeared, says that group's leader, Angelica Ramirez.

Bodies are often dissolved and deposited in septic tanks, including one really grim example in Tijuana's cop fighting compound, where authorities have discovered the teeth of at least 22 people. The tip-off came when cops arrested a guy in 2009 who said that he was a "posolero" or stew maker, i.e. somebody who doesn't actually make nice soups but dissolves the bodies in lye or caustic soda.

Other hyper-specific words have been coined for this conveyor belt of death. For example, "encopijado", which is a murder victim wrapped in a blanket. Pretty awful. I mean, "Stewmaker" is just disgusting and terrifying. Yeah, it's pretty industrialized, especially in Tijuana.

And of course the media has come under fire too, right? So in January 2022, two journalists are shot dead just in one week. It's definitely a connected thing. 125 reporters have been killed in Mexico since 2002, most of whom have been working the so-called Nota Roja, or Red Note, a kind of Pulp Fiction term for the crime beat. Although I think it's kind of a byword for yellow journalism. So if anyone from TJ knows about that, let us know. I'd like to know more about that.

The main drug remains, of course, cocaine. But in recent years, things have really ramped up with meth and fentanyl, and they have proved incredibly profitable products for the Tijuana cartel and its rivals. Right, it's an excellent 2022 Washington Post feature called To Live and Die in Tijuana. Quote, Tijuana has long been a major transit point for illicit goods into the United States. Alcohol during prohibition, waves of marijuana and cocaine after that. Now it is

It is a city of fentanyl. It is the most prolific trafficking hub in the United States for the drug and increasingly a city of users. Tijuana is now far and away the most important place on the border for fentanyl trafficking.

Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized about 19,000 pounds of fentanyl entering San Diego from Tijuana, compared with 10,000 pounds entering Arizona, south of Tucson, the second biggest fentanyl crossing point. And the piece, you really have to read it, it's on the reading list, it goes on, quote,

Between May 2013 and June this year, the federal government made 462 arrests for fentanyl-related crimes, according to a Freedom of Information request, compared with 116,689 arrests for producing, trafficking or selling large quantities of other drugs during that same time period. In many cases, Mexican authorities sieged large loads of fentanyl

without arresting anyone. So you see how this whole industry is just slipping straight through the net. Fentanyl labs have a smaller footprint than their meth equivalents, and some Tijuana labs have even been disguised as little piñata shops.

Alongside Mexicali, a border city three hours east, Tijuana has become a perfect laboratory for cartels to calculate the exact dosage of fentanyl users can take non-lethally. So it's basically using their own addicts as lab rats for the most potent street drug in human history. You can imagine how that's just making the bodies pile high too. So, cartels have essentially taken over Tijuana.

They're running sex, people smuggling, and thanks to synthetics like fentanyl, they're making billions and creating a whole new generation of addicts. And all the while, the cops are either doing nothing on the cartel payroll, or perhaps worse, perhaps better, planning to steal boatloads of drugs. And all of this culminates in something crazy, and it all kicks off on the afternoon of August 12th, 2022. I'm returning to that WAPO piece here, so kudos to whoever runs that bureau. Quote,

The power that drug trafficking organizations wield is normally difficult to assess, but periodically the scale becomes clear, an invisible army suddenly emerging to strike. And that's what happened on the afternoon of August 12th in Tijuana. It had begun as an uneventful day in the Attorney General's office, where officers cataloged their most recent fentanyl seizure. Before sunset, the calls started coming in. Criminals had stolen a public bus and set it on fire.

then a taxi, then another bus. Within minutes, Tijuana was riddled with narco bloqueos, or cartel roadblocks, paralyzing the city and effectively shuttering the world's busiest land border crossing. "We're going to create mayhem so the fucking government frees our people," a message that circulated on WhatsApp said. "We're the Jalisco New Generation Cartel."

We don't want to hurt good people, but it's best they don't go outside. We're going to attack anyone we see on the streets these days. By midnight, 42 vehicles had been set aflame. The US government ordered diplomats to shelter in place. Factory workers slept under conveyor belts. Bus drivers abandoned their buses for fear their vehicles would be hijacked.

Yeah, I mean, we've seen this happen before, right? In other countries, I think we talked about it happening in El Salvador a lot with the gangs. They used to do that. Setting buses on fire was a very popular thing, killing bus drivers. Brazil, too, I think. I'm not sure if it was the PCC or one. They had that week where they shut down the city in Sao Paulo. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a pretty common tactic for really powerful, you know, gangs that are organized, cartels, things of that nature. Yeah, and I think we saw it recently in Sweden, right, as well, with a lot of these kind of ethnic gangs that are running around Stockholm. I think they, as well as, like, firing RPGs into each other's houses, which sounds fun, I think they were, like, blocking off the streets. I mean, in the middle of Stockholm, which is pretty shocking, but...

Yeah, that is nuts. Yeah, we've got to do some more stuff on that soon.

So in less than a day, Tijuana begins to resemble a war zone. Despite these CJNG messages, they're targeting bystanders and burning random cars and buildings. And of course people are terrified. It's one of the biggest shows of cartel power since Mexico's drug war began in 2006, and it ignites a debate over who's really in control of the country. AMLO sends military reinforcements into Tijuana, and he gives a speech at a military base.

Work is underway, he says. The most important thing is that the causes that lead to insecurity and violence throughout the country and in Baja California are being addressed. I mean, what's that meme about? We need to find the guy who did this. Anyway, but within Tijuana, citizens and political leaders are telling a very different story.

Quote, federal authorities say there were no terrorism, but we say we had terrorism here in Tijuana, local politician Carlos Atilano Pena tells NPR, because they gained what they were seeking, to have a lot of problems and fear in the population.

Even American experts, who are so loathed oftentimes to pin any blame on Mexican officials, they say August 12th is evidence of a systemic crime in the country. Quote, these events should encourage us to think really seriously, precisely, about what these structural conditions are that allowed this violence to take place. This is Cecilia Farfan-Mendez of UC San Diego's U.S.-Mexico Study Center.

Now 64% of Mexicans believe that organized criminal groups buy off public officials, which actually seems pretty low, all things considered, but it's still not great and the evidence is there.

Possibly the most outspoken voice against the August 12th violence and the power of the cartels is Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero, a native of Oaxaca who grew up in poverty before getting a degree and heading into politics. She says, quote, "Today we are saying to the organized crime groups that are committing these crimes that Tijuana is going to remain open and take care of its citizens."

And then she adds that asking organized crime, which is the term used in Mexico for drug cartels, to quote, settle their debts with those who didn't pay what they owe, not with families and hardworking citizens. So you can see even there, it's like kind of milquetoast. She just is asking them to settle debts and kill people within their own circles and not get involved in the citizenry. But none of this really does much to shift the dial, which is unsurprising.

In March 2023, soldiers discover almost 2 million fentanyl pills at a Tijuana stash house. And that's ironically just a day before AMLO announces the drug isn't produced in Mexico. So, uh, whoops. And that may gunman attack one of Caballero's bodyguards as he's driving her official vehicle. He survives, but it's a clear, clear warning.

Narcos put up narcomantas, or banners, threatening Caballero's life, and somebody tries to enter her apartment claiming he'd been given permission. So in June, Caballero, she announces that she's going to live at an army base for her own safety. She doesn't say who from, but again, everybody knows it's the cartels.

So, a drug industry off the scale, body counts in the thousands, reporters gunned down, a city on fire, sex and people traded like Pokemon, cops going all Butch Cassidy and the mayor holed up in an army barracks. It's no wonder that Tijuana is Mexico's murder capital.

Just last month, another member of the Alejandro Felix clan, Pablo Edwin Huerta Nuno, I mean, these guys have got to get shorter names, who was a placer boss, he disappeared after a shootout. So, you can expect reprisals, bloodshed, and more death. Oh, and

And somehow these guys are still heroes for a lot of people and while Narco Corridos or Narco songs have always been popular in Mexico, Tijuana has birthed something new and perhaps the least forgivable of everything we've covered in this episode. Narco Corridos kids. So here to play us out is Kevin AMF with a song called Rich Kid. Take it away, Kevin.

He basically sounds like Manu Chao. Anyway, guys, listen in next week. We'll be back with another show and Patreon, subscribe, social media, all that cool stuff. Take care.

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